From the Guardian: "The Fall of the Vulcans"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1225540,00.html

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday May 27, 2004
The Guardian

Iraq has turned into a disastrous defeat for America and Britain. All the current debate is essentially about damage limitation. The Bush administration invaded Iraq on what has proved to be a false prospectus. It has made a terrible mess of the occupation. It has created more terrorist threats than were there before. Its military has shamed America with the torture in Abu Ghraib. It has provoked waves of anti-Americanism. And the whole business has been a vast, hugely expensive distraction from the pressing challenges that face America and Europe, including poverty, global warming and the very real struggle against the al-Qaida assassins of New York and Madrid. Even if things get better in Iraq, this indictment will stand.

<>T he end of vulcanism, if that is what results from the Iraq debacle, does not and should not mean the end of the application of American military power anywhere in the world. It means the end of a one-dimensional, unilateralist, evangelical belief in American military power as the key to world politics. Even the original Vulcan, as connoisseurs of Roman mythology will remember, was a clumsy bore, which is one reason his wife Venus (recently identified as a symbol of Europe) cuckolded him with the more mobile Mars.

The question now, for us Europeans, is how can we best help Vulcan off the stage. Jean-Marie Colombani of Le Monde, author of the famous "We are all Americans" headline after the 9/11 attacks, recently responded to the Abu Ghraib atrocities by suggesting that Donald Rumsfeld has made us all non-Americans, and by coming out firmly in support of John Kerry. It was a fine, incisive article, and largely right in its analysis, but I fear this ringing French endorsement for Kerry may be worth several thousand votes for Bush.

<>Finally, the crucial election for Europe - not the European elections next month, but the American one on November 2 - will be decided by Americans for American reasons. And the deciding factor may not be any foreign entanglement, nor even the economy, but the candidacy of Ralph Nader, which is likely to take pivotal anti-Bush votes away from Kerry, as it did from Al Gore in 2000. If only Nader would stand down.

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